by Unknown
I looked up to see the blind eyes of the roc shining in the starlight. Perhaps it dimly recognized the tasty morsel running directly beneath it. The threads of its fate had nearly unraveled—the beast was old, blind, and sick. The desert air that eddied and pooled at the tips of its feathers sang to me. It could barely stay aloft.
Najh’s blade swished in the air behind me, trying to sever the threads of my own destiny.
I risked a glance over my shoulder at Shaba. She had managed to halt the Eye from its plunge, her arms wrapped around it. Her face was contorted in a rictus of pain. The heat must have been incredible, and I marveled that the hermit could maintain such a grip. The stench of cooking flesh filled the air, and I knew Shaba wouldn’t be able to hold it much longer.
Then I ran straight into a wall of reeking feathers, and had no further time to contemplate Shaba’s predicament. Filthy barbs snatched at my hair and plucked at my beard, entangling me in the bird’s plumage. Najh had me at his mercy.
Yet fate was not so kind to Najh Semekh. With a groan like the earth itself splitting apart, Shaba rose to her feet, hefting the Eye of Azzah in her blistering hands. With a last, worshipful glance at the writing upon the stone, she hurled it at Najh.
What it must have cost her to give up that stone! And she did it for me.
The stone struck Najh across the kidneys, sending him staggering backward.
Right into the blind pecking of the roc.
Whatever the roc could see, it sensed that at least one violator of its nest was within striking distance, and the great bronze curve of its beak lunged down and plucked the would-be assassin from the floor. The attack dislodged me from the vile black feathers, and I tumbled to the ground.
To his credit, Najh made a valiant fight of it. Despite the razor-keen grip of the beak slicing into his torso, he still struggled, managing to puncture one milky eye with his poisoned blade. The roc lifted fully into the sky, blanketing the tower in a black snow of feathers. With one talon like a cage of wrought iron, it tore the assassin from its beak.
Well, most of him anyway. Much of the rest vanished into the roc’s pink gullet or fell as crimson rain upon me.
But the roc was gravely injured by Najh’s final blow. It wheeled in a frenzied spiral, pulverizing stones and smashing sun-rotted timbers. I struggled to rise in the heaving chaos. I cried out to Shaba to come nearer, but even as the words formed on my lips, the top of the tower gave way with a roar that drowned out even the roc’s dying screech. The surge of rubble carried us all—Shaba, myself, the Eye of Azzah, and the roc itself—out into the nocturnal abyss of the Ketz sky.
A miasma of stinging dust enfolded me, choking out sight and sound and air. But I had already prepared my call to the desert winds, and they congealed beneath me in a pillar like the very breath of the dunes. I righted myself in the column of air and searched the roiling clouds for the hermit.
A fold of homespun wool, fluttering within the billowing dust, caught my eye. A ribbon of her long black hair caught the delicate glint of starlight, and in that brief flash I knew that she had never been destined to be buried in the sky like her revered Azzah. Greater things lay in store.
At my command, the desert winds shifted again, and a finger of air unwound from the body of my rescuing pillar, stretching out to catch her and slow her fall.
The rest of the debris crashed into the desert in a clangorous rumble, burying both the roc and the Eye of Azzah. We touched down atop the rubble several moments later, raising only the barest cloud of dust.
Shaba grimaced when she saw the ruin.
“The satrap nearly had his wish, halfling. You were right.” She spat a muddy gob of dust.
“It pains me to be so.”
Shaba crouched for long minutes without reply, sifting through the debris. Her hands were blistered from the Eye’s touch, and I wondered how she could stand to move them at all. After some few minutes I grew impatient to return to the tower and see if any of the treasures in the interior remained unburied, yet I forced myself to wait. At last, she pulled a fist-sized chunk of heatstone from the pile. Only fragments of Azzah’s final words remained. Shaba’s expression was as shattered as the Eye.
“The Eye is destroyed,” I said.
“But you’re safe,” she replied. I couldn’t tell if it was a curse.
There was a long pause. Then at last I asked the question that hung over us. “Why did you save me, Shaba? It cost you the stone, yet you didn’t hesitate.”
A rare smile bloomed on her face. It was the crooked grin of someone unused to such expressions of mirth, but I decided I liked it when Shaba smiled.
“Perhaps it was your destiny, Kazzar.”
I returned her smile and plucked a large black feather from between two stones. Such a treasure, even with its barbs kinked from the fall, would make a mighty pen, or perhaps adorn a fine new turban.
“We could piece the stone back together,” I suggested.
“But it would take many days to gather all the fragments, while the satrap yet plots.” She tumbled the fragment of the Eye in her hands. “I had hoped Azzah’s stone would unify our temple, but perhaps my own words will have to serve for now.”
“We can’t go back to Katheer,” I said. “At least not yet.”
Shaba had climbed down from the rubble to the rocky sand. The sky brightened almost imperceptibly. Sarenrae’s glory would rise above the horizon soon. Her hermit-priest raised an eyebrow at me.
“No, it’s the best time to return. It will unbalance the conspirators. Force the satrap and his allies among the high priests to acknowledge me. I will not be intimidated. How about you, Haron esh Kazzar?”
I decided, just for that moment, to let Sarenrae’s star guide my fate, and followed the priest back to where the camels waited.
And for me.